Twilight in Hazard

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes the story of how a convergence of events at the start of the new millennium continues to impact life in the region and the soul of the nation.

"Twilight in Hazard paints a more nuanced portrait of Appalachia than Vance did... Maimon eviscerates Vance's bestseller with stiletto precision." -Associated Press

From investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Alan Maimon comes the story of how a perfect storm of events has had a devastating impact on life in small town Appalachia, and on the soul of a shaken nation . . .

When Alan Maimon got the assignment in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him to cover the region "like a foreign correspondent would."

And indeed, when Maimon arrived in Hazard, Kentucky fresh off a reporting stint for the New York Times's Berlin bureau, he felt every bit the outsider. He had landed in a place in the vice grip of ecological devastation and a corporate-made opioid epidemic-a place where vote-buying and drug-motivated political assassinations were the order of the day.

While reporting on the intense religious allegiances, the bitter, bareknuckledpolitical rivalries, and the faltering attempts to emerge from a century-long coal-based economy, Maimon learns that everything-and nothing-you have heard about the region is true.And far from being a foreign place, it is a region whose generations-long struggles are driven by quintessentially American forces.

Resisting the easy cliches, Maimon's Twilight in Hazard gives us a profound understanding of the region from his years of careful reporting. Itis both a powerful chronicle of a young reporter's immersion in a place, and of his return years later-this time as the husband of a Harlan County coal miner's daughter-to find the area struggling with its identity and in the thrall of Trumpism as a political ideology.

Twilight in Hazard refuses to mythologize Central Appalachia. It is a plea to move past the fixation on coal, and a reminder of the true costs to democracy when the media retreats from places of rural distress. It is an intimate portrait of a people staring down some of the most pernicious forces at work in America today while simultaneously being asked- How could you let this happen to yourselves?

Twilight in Hazard instead tells the more riveting, noirish,and sometimes bitingly humorous story of how we all let this happen.